Anything worth doing is worth doing well.
If you believe that, then you know you need to put in the work. This is true of any category of human activity. Mastery comes through repetition and stacking one focused moment on another, one skill on another.
When you start, progress seems to come quickly. The effort yields improvement. We can apply our new skills to the task at hand. We are in the “this, so that” phase. For example, “I learn a new skill so that I can make more money.”
A reason why is your motivation.
Then we plateau. We don’t seem to be making as much progress. Many people quit there. The ones who keep going enter the “this, because this” phase. The work becomes a meditation. It’s true practice. “I’m not focused on a reward. I am focused on doing this with excellence.”
Meditation is the motivation.
If we stay at it, sometime later we’ll notice that we just did something without any seeming effort. Our bodies just knew what to do. Our intuition made a connection nobody else saw. The work we put in showed up at just the right time without any conscious effort. We are now in the “just this” phase.
The moment is the motivation.